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Groups Call for Scientists to Engage the Body Politic

HOUSE PHYSICISTS From left, Representative Rush Holt of New Jersey; Bill Foster of Illinois, who is seeking to reclaim his seat; and Vernon Ehlers of Michigan, who retired this year. Dr. Foster and Dr. Ehlers formed Ben Franklin's List.Credit
Brendan Smialowski for The New York Times

When asked to name a scientist, Americans are stumped. In one recent survey, the top choice, at 47 percent, was Einstein, who has been dead since 1955, and the next, at 23 percent, was “I don’t know.” In another survey, only 4 percent of respondents could name a living scientist.

While these may not have been statistically rigorous exercises, they do point to something real: In American public life, researchers are largely absent. Trained to stick to the purity of the laboratory, they tend to avoid the sometimes irrational hurly-burly of politics.

For example, according to the Congressional Research Service, the technically trained among the 435 members of the House include one physicist, 22 people with medical training (including 2 psychologists and a veterinarian), a chemist, a microbiologist and 6 engineers.

Now several groups are trying to change that. They want to encourage scientists and engineers to speak out in public debates and even run for public office. When it comes to global warming and a host of other technical issues, “there is a disconnect between what science says and how people perceive what science says,” said Barbara A. Schaal, a biologist and vice president of the National Academy of Sciences. “We need to interact with the public for our good and the public good.”

Dr. Schaal heads the academy’s new Science Ambassador Program in which researchers will be recruited and trained to speak out on their areas of expertise. The effort will start in Pittsburgh, where scientists and engineers who specialize in energy will be encouraged to work with public organizations and agencies.

“We are looking for people who are energy experts and who have a real desire to reach out,” Dr. Schaal said.

Separately, a five-year-old nonprofit group called Scientists and Engineers for America, or Sefora, offers guidance and encouragement to researchers considering a run for public office — from local school boards to the House and Senate. With more scientists involved in the legislative agenda, the group maintains, there can be better decision making in things like research financing, math and science education and national infrastructure problems.

“Just get involved, the country needs your expertise, your analytical thinking and your approach to issues,” Vernon Ehlers, a physicist who came to Congress in 1993, says in a video on the Sefora Web site. “If you can learn nuclear physics, you can learn politics.”

In a telephone interview, Dr. Ehlers, a Michigan Republican who retired this year, said he thinks a kind of “reverse snobbery” keeps researchers out of public life. “You have these professors struggling to write their $30,000 grant applications at the same time there are people they would never accept in their research groups making $100-million decisions in the National Science Foundation or the Department of Energy,” he said. He said it was “shortsighted” of the science and engineering community not to encourage “some of their best and brightest” into public life.

Until this year, Dr. Ehlers was part of a three-man physics caucus in the House, along with Rush Holt, Democrat of New Jersey, who was elected to Congress in 1998, and Bill Foster, Democrat of Illinois, who won his seat in 2008 but lost it last year to a Republican with Tea Party support.

This year, Dr. Ehlers and Dr. Foster formed a bipartisan political action committee they called Ben Franklin’s List, whose goal was to offer engineers and scientists the credibility and money they need to win office. “Scientist, politician, patriot,” Dr. Foster said of Franklin. “It’s all on-message.”

Ben Franklin’s List was to be modeled on Emily’s List, a group organized in 1985 to advance the cause of female candidates who supported abortion rights. But Ben Franklin’s List would have no ideological litmus test.

In a sense, however, the project is suffering from its own ethos: Dr. Foster, its major organizer, announced in May that he was a candidate for Congress again and therefore would have to withdraw from the effort.

“There’s no way I can run a nonpartisan organization the same time I am running for Congress,” he said.

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Dr. Foster, a onetime physicist at Fermilab, said he feared his departure for the campaign trail would be “a mortal blow” to Ben Franklin’s List. But Dr. Ehlers would not declare it dead, even though the project is more than he can run himself, especially since he is out of Washington now. He said he hoped others would embrace the idea.

“I would be willing to join forces with them,” he said. “I am happy to help out.”

Generally, hopes for technical bipartisanship rest in part on the belief — widespread among researchers — that the nation’s engineers, as a group, tend to be Republicans while its academic scientists tend to be Democrats. And in theory, as Dr. Foster put it, if people on both sides of the aisle can agree on “the quantitative facts” of an issue, policy differences need not inevitably lead to bitter partisan gridlock.

In other efforts, the American Association for the Advancement of Science offers fellowships that put new Ph.D. researchers into Congressional offices and federal agencies. And the Aldo Leopold Leadership Program offers environmental researchers training in how to communicate with the public and policy makers. One of its founders was Jane Lubchenco, a marine scientist who left a research position at Oregon State University in 2008 to lead the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Sometimes finances are an issue. “It’s difficult to monetize something like this,” said Brian D. Athey, a professor of biomedical informatics at the University of Michigan Medical School and the chairman of the board of Sefora. And he said Sefora did not know how many of the scientists and engineers who have attended its workshops have sought — or won — elected office. “We need informed members of Congress, we need informed city mayors, we need governors who understand science and engineering,” Dr. Athey said.

There is plenty of scope for these efforts, said Dr. Foster, who cited “glaring instances of technical ignorance on both sides of the aisle.” He recalled a fellow Democrat (whom he would not name) as advocating greater use of wind power “because windmills poll so well” — which is not, Dr. Foster said, a sound basis for energy policy. And then there was the Republican who praised the development of GPS technology as an example of innovation unfettered by government, apparently unaware that the technology is a product of government-sponsored research.

Whether these various efforts can succeed is an open question.

Daniel S. Greenberg, author of the 2001 book “Science, Money and Politics” (University of Chicago Press), said in an interview that he thought the odds of success were “pretty poor,” in part because of the widespread belief that such activity is inappropriate for serious researchers or taints their objectivity. He pointed to the presidential election of 1964, when scientists organized opposition to Barry Goldwater, the Republican candidate. Goldwater was defeated, but, Mr. Greenberg said, the effort left many researchers feeling “we have sullied science.”

Even today, when researchers enter the political arena, “the scientific establishment holds that against a scientist to some extent,” Dr. Holt, the New Jersey congressman, said in a telephone interview.

Alan I. Leshner, a psychologist who heads the American Association for the Advancement of Science, agreed. He recalled learning as a young scientist in the 1960s that people who engaged in issues outside the lab “were wasting time and a sellout.” Young researchers today want their work to be “relevant, useful and used,” he said, but “they still get that message from their mentors.”

Some researchers are concerned that if they leave the lab, even briefly, they will never be able to pick up the thread of their technical careers. But Dr. Foster said he had had no shortage of interesting job opportunities in science after his two years in Congress. And, he added, such risks were built into public service.

“If you are a businessman, your business goes off the rails,” Dr. Foster said. “If you are a lawyer, your practice will degrade. You are asking people to make a sacrifice, no question about it.”

In an interview last week, Dr. Foster compared what he called political logic with scientific logic, citing the debate over the debt ceiling. “The political logic is ‘what I can get away with saying that people will believe,’ ” he said. “The scientific logic is ‘what are the best estimates for the relevant numbers.’ ” When the two collide, he said, “the political logic is overwhelming.”

Still, he plans to break away from his Congressional campaign this week to address a conference at Brown University organized by the American Physical Society, the nation’s major organization of physicists. He developed the outlines of his talk when he was working on Ben Franklin’s List. His topic: being a scientist in Congress.

A version of this article appears in print on August 9, 2011, on Page D1 of the New York edition with the headline: Groups Call for Scientists To Engage the Body Politic. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe